Jonathan Cooper is Animation Director on Assassin's Creed III at Ubisoft Montreal.
Cinematics Sans Cutscenes
Posted on April 23rd, 2010 at 3:42pm under Cutscenes, GAME ANIM Articles
Composition
Last, and perhaps most important of all, we must take all the elements of our cutscene alternative and combine them in a manner that makes sense with the purpose of such a solution, to direct the player towards our chosen narrative in an aesthetically cinematic manner. So for that we must also support the established rules in photography of balanced composition.
Again with the developer-authored approach, below we see God of War doing an excellent job of dynamically adjusting the camera to always offer a balanced composition between Kratos and the Kraken. With the wooden post as a good visual indicator of the line-of-action, the Santa Monica team rely on camera “zones” – when the player crosses the line of action, he enters a new zone that causes the camera to shift between its two pre-defined positions, maintaining the composition.
So how might we use this methodology for a more free-form type of game where subject positions are more dynamic and can change relative to one another throughout via player movement? For that solution, we must go back over a decade to the seminal title Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.
On the game’s release, much was made of the heralded Z-Targetting feature. Below is a video breaking down the various elements that combined to give us our first stab at a holistic cinematic mode during gameplay. Without a target, on holding (or toggling) the easily reached Z-button on the underside of the controller, the aspect ratio narrows from television’s 4:3 to the now standard 16:9 and the field of view narrows to something more akin to that of film, better framing protagonist Link against the background.
With a target, however, is where this system comes into its own. In the tutorial below, the camera draws a dynamic composition between Link and the target, the slightly lagging camera loosely framing the two subjects while still affording total control over the player movement. The player is even able to cross the aforementioned line-of-action without disorientation due once again to the absence of cuts, and like any good design the system has multiple uses, being employed in a consistent manner for both conversations and combat.
4 Comments on this post
Jonathan
24 May 2010, 10:40pm
While it does sound like a cool idea to fit photography into the fiction, I’ve played in in Beyond Good & Evil, Dead Rising, Bioshock and the Fatal Frame series and by pushing the accepted compositional limits have found each to be VERY forgiving in terms of subject positioning. This is almost certainly the result of user-friendliness to avoid alienating players who don’t understand even basic composition, and I fear that teaching it in tutorials and/or as part of the narrative will still prove inaccessible to most players.
This is reinforced by an industry-wide shift in all areas of game design to place a high importance on accessibility – not just to appease the lowest common denomination of player, but to allow us to concentrate on higher-level problems without worrying if the player can understand even the basics.
What I’m really looking for here is a universal solution (or if not that, at least a universal philosophy) that can allow us to get closer to the core of what games do best in terms of storytelling without always falling back on the crutch of film-based cinematography, and I’m afraid having to add even basic camera-handling on top of the other things a player must master to access our stories is rather undesirable.
Thanks for the ideas though – personally I love to play as a photojournalist in games, but as with the Half Life 2 example, that’s just me…
[...] simplisitc so far, but we are beginning to learn greater subtlety. Jonathan Cooper’s essay Cinematics without Cutscenes is a great starting point for designers interested in this topic. Possibly related posts: [...]
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Max Battcher
25 Apr 2010, 9:47pm
This was a great article. Thanks!
»As with the second Half Life 2 example, this is the one area over which we as developers must maintain control due to players simply lacking the artistry required to cinematically compose shots, offering the option of cinematic visuals to all who wish to participate.«
I spun off into a brief tangent (to Twitter) at that example, and came back to the article, but this summary paragraph brings me back to my earlier tangent (which I guess makes a secant really). I’m certain this isn’t a terribly far reach from your article, and you’ve probably considered some of this, but here’s my thinking today:
If you want to give players full/complete control of the camera, and yet encourage them towards artistry in their game experience, then it makes sense to reward players for doing so. That is, you could make cinematic shot composition a system in the game that can be mastered. Of course, such a system has the usual negatives: you abdicate to players the “ability” to have a sub-optimal experience, and you deal with trying to quantify and program “artistic sensibilities”. On the other hand, in the best case you encourage players to see the most cinematic version of events, and convince them that it was their choice to play it that way (even when there wasn’t ever really a choice).
Players may not have the artistry necessary at the beginning of the game, but as with nearly any other game system, if you give the players the right feedback and the system is well tuned, you can train the player towards mastery. In such a system, I think the dominating issue becomes not so much the player’s artistry as the player’s dexterity to perform expected movements and game choices (all for appropriate “editing”) in real time, depending upon the complexity of the system design (and composition powers awarded to players).
Gears of War’s “Y” system is an example of such a system design. Better examples, I think, are the “camera modes” of Dead Rising and Beyond Good and Evil. Both games reward players for taking interesting “photos” with still-photo cameras (even/particularly during key cinematic moments). I’m wondering if there are lessons from these camera modes that can be pulled out and generalized to normal game play moments, rather than only used in sniper-like photo-journalism mini-games.
It would be interesting if GTA4 awarded players bonuses for performing actions using more cinematic views such as the “handbrake cam”. (I could imagine Saints Row 3 providing a camera like that and giving Style XP bonus modifiers for using it.) It might make Half-Life 2′s sequences stronger if the player was rewarded (extra health or extra ammo, perhaps) for paying attention to the action and focusing in on important characters. (It would also be easy to see a use for a “decorum” system in that case as well, rewarding (rather than restricting) for respecting the social rule of not using weapons around friends.)
Anyway, I really appreciated your article and really wanted to point out the Dead Rising/BG&E examples and the idea of trying to “make shot composition a game (system) that players can master”.